Caution! God's Favor ... Handle With Care Series

This week I’ve begun reading a new book by one of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, titled Outliers: The Story of Success. The premise of the book is simple: no successful person is a self-made man; everyone who gets to the top had a lot advantages, help, and luck. He devotes two chapters to geniuses. In our society, we expect people who are blessed with a high IQ to rise to high levels of success. Gladwell reveals that that’s not necessarily the case. Consider Chris Langan, arguably the smartest man in the world, with an IQ of 200. (The average person has an IQ of 100; Albert Einstein rated 150.) With his natural intelligence, Langan should be at the top of any profession he chose. Early on, that appeared to be the outcome of his life:

“He was speaking at six months of age. When he was three, he would listen to the radio on Sundays as the announcer read the comics aloud, and he would follow along on his own until he had taught himself to read.

“In school, Langan could walk into a test in a foreign-language class, not having studied at all, and if there were two or three minutes before the instructor arrived, he could skim through the textbook and ace the test. In his early teenage years, while working as a farmhand, he started to read widely in the area of theoretical physics. At sixteen, he made his way through Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s famously abstruce masterpiece Principia Mathmatica. He got a perfect score on his SAT, even though he fell asleep at one point during the test.

“‘He did math for an hour,’ his brother Mark says of Langan’s summer routine in high school. ‘Then he did French for an hour. The he studied Russian. Then he would read philosophy. He did that religiously, every day.’

“Another of his brothers, Jeff, says, ‘You know, when Christopher was fourteen or fifteen, he would draw things just as a joke, and it would be like a photograph. When he was fifteen, he could match Jimi Hendrix lick for lick on a guitar. Boom. Boom. Boom. Half the time Christopher didn’t attend school at all. He would just show up for tests and there was nothing they could do about it. To us it was hilarious. He could brief a semester’s worth of textbooks in two days, and take care of whatever he had to take care of, and then get back to whatever he was doing in the first place.’”

Sadly, Langan has yet to reach his potential. He’s only had a year and a half of college, having been kicked out of two universities. As a young man he worked on a clam boat, took factory jobs, and was employed in a minor civil service position. He spent most of his adult life working as a bouncer in a bar on Long Island. In that time he wrote a massive book combining philosophy, mathematics, and physics on the subject “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe.” Unfortunately, no scholarly journal will look at it because Langan has no academic background. And he’s not personally very motivate to market the book to publishers. Gladwell devotes some detail to Langan’s lack of achievement, but it really comes down to this: he didn’t know how to use the gift he was blessed with. His poor family background left him ill-equipped to handle himself around people and, as a result, his high IQ remains an untapped potential.

This is a long way to introduce this morning’s message, but I think you’ll see the link immediately. God has invested enormous potential in us, but few of us utilize it effectively. Not only is there untapped potential within, but God’s favor is upon. Unfortunately we tend to mishandle it, just as Langan mishandled his intelligence. As a result, we don’t quite live up to the gifts God has given us. I go so far as to say that our nation has been blessed with God’s special favor, but, because of our mismanagement, His gifts are being taken away.

In every age, God blesses his people so that a watching world will know who the real God is. In the time of the Patriarchs God’s favor could be seen in the material blessings and number of descendants they enjoyed. When Israel moved out of Egypt the plagues and opening of the Red Sea were signs of His presence. When the nation was established in Canaan, God revealed his favor through conquest of the enemies of Israel and Judah. In the days of the early Church, His blessings came in the form of signs, wonders, and miracles. In every age, God send His heavenly assets to His people.

It’s imperative that we learn how to manage the heavenly assets God sends our way, as individuals, a church, and a nation. We can see some clear guidelines toward this end from Genesis 39, which we read earlier.